Federal CIO Tony Scott: Another Cyber Sprint?

The cybersecurity sprint may have ended, but efforts to improve cybersecurity aren’t over, Federal Chief Information Officer (CIO) Tony Scott said at the August 11 FITARA Forum.

“I wanted to assure you we’re not taking our eye off the ball on that,” Scott said. “I can tell you that I’m very pleased with the overall results. I’m pleased with the corrective action plans that we’ve seen coming in from the agencies. We’re on it. We’re going to stay on it, and as I’ve said before this is just a warm-up exercise for the work that we have to do and will do going forward.”

Some of the results have been published on performance.gov. But not all information collected from agencies will be made public.

“For reasons that might be obvious, we’re not going to publish all of the results,” Scott said. “We don’t want to provide a roadmap [for] somebody who might want to look for vulnerabilities about precisely where to go look.”

The administration ordered the 30-day cybersecurity sprint following the data breaches at the Office of Personnel Management. Federal agencies increased their use of authentication and made other changes to improve cybersecurity during the 30-day “sprint” to strengthen computer networks and protect data.